Andy Warhol was born in Pittsburgh on August 6th,
1928. He was the third son of Ondrej Warhola and his wife Julia Zavacky.
The reason why I decided to choose Andy Warhol is because his family and
I share the same background. We are Ruthenians! His parents emigrated
from the Carpathian Mountains located in Central Europe.

As a boy, young Andy attended Holmes Elementary
school. When he was eight he got sick from rheumatic fever that later
turned into chorea. He was made fun at school and therefore he was nursed
at home by his mother. When he turned nine, Andy started going to morning
art classes at the Carnegie Museum. After he graduated from high school,
he went to study art at the Carnegie Institue of Technology where he majored
in pictorial design. This is where he learned the Bauhaus technique that
art was a business. After he graduated from college, he opened his own
studio in New York called the Factory.

While at college his friends and fellow students
thought he had "a childlike duality about him". However, not one person
then considered that he might be homosexual. In 1948, he had a job in
the display department of a store and he used to paint his fingernails
a different color every day and also he used to dye his shoes odd colors.

Shortly after in 1949 he moved to New York and
got a job as a commercial artist. He got his first break in August 1949,
when Glamour Magazine wanted him to illustrate a feature entitled "Success
is a Job in New York". But by accident the credit read "Drawings by Andy
Warhol" and that's how Andy dropped the "a" in his last name. In 1953
he received one of his first awards for his advertisement for the radio
programme the Nation's Nightmare. He is considered a founder and major
figure of the POP ART movement. He continued doing ads and illustrations
and by 1955 he was the most successful and imitated commercial artist
in New York. In 1960 he produced the first of his paintings showing enlarged
comic strip images - such as Popeye and Superman . He worked as an illustrator
for several magazines including Vogue, Harper's Bazaar and The New Yorker
and did advertising and window displays for retail stores such as Bonwit
Teller and I. Miller.

In 1953, a year after his mother moved to New
York to live with him, Andy began going so bald that he bought a wig for
himself. He was one of the first individuals to do so back at that time.

The main focus of his interest was repetition.
He developed silk screen techniques and this is how he could reproduce
images more easily. His Marilyn Monroe (1962) was inspired by her death.
These specific images, incorporating such items as Campbell's Soup cans,
dollar bills, Coca-Cola bottles, and the faces of celebrities, can be
taken as comments on the banality, harshness, and ambiguity of American
culture.

By 1963, drugs were a huge influence in Andy's
life and on the Factory's output. Warhold turned the Factory into a film
making studio. He has made a series of underground films, which were tremendously
long (some over 25 hours) and lacked action. These films were dealing
with such ideas as time, boredom, and repetition and some of them are
Sleep (1963), Empire (1964), and The Chelsea Girls (1966). He always used
to get his friends to act in his films, but he would rarely pay them.

On June 3rd, 1968, Valerie Solanis, a rejected
superstar, came into The Factory and shot Andy three times in the chest.
He was rushed to hospital where he was pronounced dead, but after having
his chest cut up and been given heart massage, he survived. Valerie Solanis
turned herself in that night and was put in a mental institution. She
was later given a three year prison sentence.

In the 70s he was respected by the Rock world.
He had become a cult figure for the jet-set society. At the start of the
1970s, Warhol began publishing Interview magazine and renewed his focus
on painting. He also published The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (from A to
B and Back Again). At that time Warhol exhibited his work extensively
in museums and galleries around the world.

Andy Warhol died in New York on February 27, 1987
after a gallbladder operation and was buried next to his parents. The
Andy Warhol Museum opened in Pittsburgh in May 1994. He is considered
by many as the most influential American artist of the second half of
the 20th century.